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Comment by genidoi | Hacker News Reader

I’m at the point where I see “smart” in a hardware product title and automatically infer “this product comes with prolonged, additional pain, tactfully facilitated by 4th rate usability design, rock bottom grade WiFi hardware, ad bombardment for no discernible reason and never ending “please subscribe” onslaught to whatever new partnership that corporate negotiated this month.

Dumb TV is unambiguously a selling point now.

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It won't have all the ads when you buy it, they'll be put in later once they hit mass market and have your money.

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

Recently bought a Samsung Smart TV for my aged mother.

It was life changing for her.

She watches YouTube mainly; she selects videos of her interest areas using voice (button less remote with Mic). Mainly watches exotic and local travel destinations. Things she has heard of, but never had a chance to go. She particularly likes the intimate, off the beaten track, short solo traveler's videos.

She feels liberated, as she says she is traveling without the need to leave the house (which she cannot due to her age and mobility issues).

Without smart TV this would not have been possible.

You could have spent 1/20th of the cost on an Apple TV or even a Firestick and she'd have got exactly the same.

Edit: And with an Apple TV it would also not be spying on her 24/7 and sending audio recordings of her private conversations back to Samsung.

Ironically Apple TV, especially the remote, is harder to use. Roku seems to be the best in terms of usability.

I agree. My 80 yo mother in law has stopped using her Apple TV because she is simply unable (or perhaps unwilling) to learn how to use the remote and how to navigate the Apple TV menus. I'm baffled as the Apple TV UI seems intuitive to me, but after spending a lot of time with her, I've realised she is simply just not up to it. Her memory is shot, which doesn't help :-(

I love the new Apple TV remote, but definitely do not buy Roku if you don't want to be spied on.

At this point, I feel like the “Apple TV remote is hard to use” is an outdated meme. The old remote with the touch surface at the top took some getting used to and is the source of most complaints. But that hasn’t been the standard remote for almost a year now[1]. They’ve moved to a far more “normal” remote that reminds me a lot of the same remote that comes with Samsung TVs.

Plus, with an AppleTV remote, you’re not going to end up with buttons for services that no longer exist or have been rebranded. My parents still have DirectTV Now and Rdio buttons on their Roku remote.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/20/18277449/apple-tv-remote-...

You seem to be reposting variations of that same comment, not sure what's up with that.

Now to address your point, thinking of the elderly is great, usability is a good point. That being said, Samsung's is absolute garbage designed to boost their advertising business. You can get the same voice-based interface on most Android TVs.

Earlier had posted on wrong parent comment. Rectified it.

The point is usability trumps. The TV is working great, screen and sound is very good. Youtube anyway had ads, and that's OK by her as she expects that when she was watching free to air normal channels.

I'll counter your anecdote with mine, that my dad finds his Samsung "smart" TV too confusing to use (without even caring about things like tracking or ads), yet he uses his Virgin Media (UK Tivo-based box) and my Apple TV boxes just fine.

Personally I dislike Samsung TV software for the same reasons as most of the others in this thread, and would rather have a dumb TV. But I do agree with your general point about usability, and would be very supportive of a TV that shipped with basic ability to enable apps such as YouTube, but that did nothing to force use of them on the user, nothing to promote content, nothing to track what people watch, etc.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Yes, we all agree that smart tvs are shipped with adware and tracking. That matters a lot to the HN crowd, but a lot less to typical consumers. This commenter found something which works well for his family and makes them happier than they would be otherwise. Why downvote that?

Facebook has been a blessing for my aging (74) mother, who went from fearing computers to using a tablet and a smartphone to keep in touch with distant relatives. As technophiles we tend to forget how much value these modern curses bring to non-tech people.

Can we even buy dumb TVs anymore? I just would never connect "smart tvs" to the internet anyway, but would love to not have all that crap in the menus and such.

Computer monitors are the last bastion of dumb screens, at most they did some post-processing and that was it. I'd certainly never buy this smart TV in disguise.

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